This essay was
published in final form, with
footnotes, in the Mississippi Law
Journal (Volume 72, No. 2, Winter 2002).

“If we can crack Mississippi,” the students said, “we can
crack
segregation
anywhere.” All other civil rights groups in 1964 considered
Mississippi—the
most impenetrable state in the union-- hopeless. The radical decision
of
Bob Moses and other leaders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee
(SNCC) to “shake up” the Magnolia State by sending six hundred young
volunteers
into every corner of the state to register new black voters brimmed
with
danger. Moses, the twenty-nine-year-old black director of the
Mississippi
Summer Project—considered a saint by those who worked with him--,
explained
to a first gathering of student volunteers, “When you’re not in
Mississippi,
it’s not real. And when you’re there, the rest of the world isn’t
real.” J. Res Brown, one of four Negro lawyers in the Magnolia
State,
had an even more ominous warning for the students: “You’re going to be
classified into two groups in Mississippi: niggers and nigger-lovers,
and
they’re tougher on nigger lovers.”

1

When John Doar told “Mississippi Summer Project” volunteers
“There
is
no federal police force—the responsibility for protection is that of
the
local police,” many in the crowd booed the forty-two-year-old Justice
Department
official. “They were hostile,” Doar later recalled. “I
hadn’t
thought through their likely reception to my comments. When the
students
started to hammer me, I thought I’d been set up a little.” As deputy
chief
of the Civil Rights division, Doar had a responsibility to spell out
the
interpretation of separation of powers adopted by the Johnson
Administration.
The Justice Department would only authorize the FBI to investigate
after
a federal crime was committed. In addition to the question of the FBI’s
legal authority, the agency lacked the manpower to provide protection
for
six hundred students wandering in and out of rural Mississippi counties
over an entire summer. Nonetheless, Doar recalled, “the SNCC kids
were pushing hard to get the federal government into a position of
protecting
students.”

Doar, as the deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Civil
Rights
Division,
sympathized very much with the objectives of the students assembled for
a weeklong training session at the Western College for Women in Oxford,
Ohio. “I admire what you intend to do,” Doar told two hundred
Summer
Project trainees in his speech. “The real heroes in this country
today are the students and particularly those students who have given
their
time and energy to correct the very bad and evil problems in the South
with respect to the way in which American Negro citizens are treated
before
the law.”

Among the crowd listening to Doar on June 19, 1964, were three
idealistic
young men who the next day would be heading south to Meridian,
Mississippi
to begin a summer of work registering blacks to vote. Mickey
Schwerner
was a good-natured twenty-four-year-old native New Yorker who was in
his
sixth month as a Mississippi-based field worker for the Congress of
Racial
Equality. White supremacists despised Schwerner, known to them as
“Goatee” or “Jew-Boy,” for having organized a boycott of a store in
Meridian
that depended heavily on black customers, but had never hired a black
employee.
Schwerner had come to Ohio with his chief aide and companion in
Meridian,
James Chaney. Chaney, age twenty-one, was a shy African-American
who had come to the CORE office in his hometown to help the movement in
any way he could. The recruit Schwerner and Chaney found to bring
back with them to Mississippi was Andrew Goodman, an intelligent,
unassuming
twenty-year-old Queens College student from Manhattan’s Upper West
Side.
Goodman explained to his mother he wanted to be in Mississippi "because
it is the most important thing going on in the country."

Schwerner was anxious to get back to Mississippi. He had
received
word in Ohio of an assault and church firebombing in Longdale, a small
town that he had visited with Chaney two weeks before. About 10 P. M.
on
June 16, a meeting of Mount Zion church leaders had just broken
up.
As seven black men and three black women left the church, masked men
lined
up in military fashion with rifles and pistols blocked their
path.
The masked men told the church members they were looking for “Jew Boy.”
Some of the thirty or so armed white men began beating the departing
blacks.
Someone spread diesel fuel around the inside of the church, then
lighted
it. Schwerner had hoped to use the Mount Zion Church as a site for a
new
“freedom school.” The first thing he wanted to do when they got
back
was to travel to Longdale and gather what facts he could about the
frightening
incident.

In the early morning hours of June 20, Schwerner, Goodman, and
Chaney
boarded their blue CORE station wagon and left the rolling hills of
southwestern
Ohio, bound for Meridian. A few hours before they left, Andy
Goodman
called his mother--who said she was "frightened beyond words"--to
report
that a few cars had already reached the Mississippi border "and got
through
all right."

Crossing the Mississippi border turned out not to be a problem
for
the
three civil rights workers either. The next day, after a short
night’s
sleep and a breakfast in Meridian, they were again in their wagon,
heading
northwest toward Longdale.

2

John Doar’s courage was well known to his classmates at St.
Paul’s
Academy
in Minneapolis. In the final game of the 1939 football season,
St.
Paul’s unbeaten team met its archrival, Blake. In the final
quarter of a close game, Blake drove the ball deep into St. Paul’s end
of the field. Classmate Ted Brooks recalled, “Three times John
Doar
stood alone between the Blake ball carrier and the goal line. He
nailed the guy. Three crunching tackles. We won 7-0.
He was fearless.”

It was a quality that served him well in the South. In
Jackson,
in the wee hours of June 12, 1963, a sniper waited in a honeysuckle
thicket
near the driveway of Medgar Evers, a thirty-seven-year-old national
field
secretary of the Mississippi NAACP. When Evers walked from his
car
to the front door of his house, the gunman shot and killed him.
Three
days later black dignitaries including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Roy Wilkins were in Jackson to attend the assassinated civil rights
leader’s
funeral and participate in a silent march. After the march in
100-degree
heat ended, several hundred young blacks refused to disperse.
They
swept down Farish Street toward the main white business district
singing
“This Little Light of Mine” and clapping hands. A battalion of helmeted
riot police in short-sleeved shirts and sunglasses formed a line to
stop
them. When Deputy Police Chief A. L. Ray ordered the
demonstrators
to go home, the young blacks began throwing bricks, stones, and bottles
in the direction of the police line. “We want the killer! We want
the killer!” the crowd chanted. Demonstrators in the rear began
stomping
feet and shouting “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” Police dogs went
berserk
and were yanked back by their leashes. Cursing police officers
drew
pistols or began swinging riot clubs. Merchants along Farish
Street
hurriedly bolted their doors.

Into the no-man’s land between the police and the rioters
walked
John
Doar. The crowd stopped for a moment, stunned as though they were
watching a ghost. Then bottles, bricks, and other missiles began
crashing
around him. Doar called to the crowd. “You’re not going to win
anything
with bottles and bricks,” he said. He could hardly be heard above
the roar of the crowd, which began to encircle him. A man with a tire
iron
lifted it and took aim at Doar’s head. An angry black woman yelled in
his
face, “We get our rumps shot up!” She asked with sarcastic
disgust,
“Are we gonna wait for the Justice Department?” Doar pleaded, “Aw, give
us a break.” Then he shouted again, “Hold it! Is there someone here who
can speak for you people?” One black youth emerged from the
demonstrators
and joined Doar in the street. “This man is right,” the youth
said,
pointing at Doar. “My name is John Doar—D-O-A-R,” the official
called
again and again. “I’m from the Justice Department, and anybody
around
here knows I stand for what is right.” He walked toward the mob,
shouting—begging—for the crowd to disperse. “Medgar Evers wouldn’t want
it this way,” he called. In an alley, a CORE worker grabbed a teenager
with a rifle who was taking aim at Doar. “Hold hands with me and help
us
move these people along,” Doar said to some nearby protesters. A
few people linked hands and they slowly began to push the mob back from
the police line. A massacre was averted. Barricades were removed
and a motorized streetsweeper began whisking up the broken glass and
other
hurled debris.

President Kennedy called Doar the next day to congratulate him
on
his
defusing of the dangerous situation.

Thirty-seven years later, when asked about the Jackson
incident,
Doar’s
face broke into a still-youthful-looking smile. “I wasn’t
concerned
about my safety—perhaps I should have been. I never was hit by any of
the
projectiles, they were sort of skipping in front of me.”

3

The phone rang in John Doar’s rambling home in Chevy Chase,
Maryland.
It was 1:30 A. M. on Monday, June 22, 1964. On the line was Mary
King, a staff worker in the Atlanta office of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating
Committee. King told Doar alarming news. On the first day
of
Freedom Summer three civil rights workers were missing in east central
Mississippi. King explained that Mickey Schwerner, Andrew
Goodman,
and James Chaney had set out from Meridian on Sunday morning in a blue
station wagon to investigate a church bombing in rural Neshoba County,
a known “high risk” area. When the three failed to return in the
afternoon as scheduled, movement workers called local hospitals, jails,
and law enforcement offices. The calls yielded no word on the
whereabouts
of the civil rights workers. Could Doar help, King asked.

Doar knew Mississippi well enough to be deeply worried.
The
three
might be dead. Doar told King that he was concerned. He would do
what he could. But, as Doar told Freedom Summer volunteers just a week
earlier, there was no federal police force. He suggested that
King
call the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol. After hanging up the
phone, Doar alerted the FBI of the disappearance of the civil rights
workers.

Two weeks earlier, Doar and Burke Marshall, head of the
Justice
Department’s
civil rights division, briefed Attorney General Robert Kennedy on the
growing
tensions in Mississippi. Since the White Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan
of Mississippi formed on February 15, Doar had been getting periodic
reports
from the FBI on the clandestine group’s activities. An April
report
to Doar told of sixty-one crosses simultaneously burning across the
state.
KKK membership in Mississippi was exploding in response to stepped-up
voter
registration drives. Over 10,000 white men made up the membership
of twenty-nine “klaverns,” or chapters. Equally disturbing was
the
lack of any political will to counter the KKK with state power.
What,
Doar wondered, was to stop them?

A 6:55 A. M. call to Mrs. Minnie Herring at the Neshoba County
Jail
produced the first clue to the mysterious disappearance of the three
civil
rights workers. Herring, who the previous afternoon had told a
caller
she had no information about the three, acknowledged to a caller from
the
Movement’s office in Jackson that Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney had
been
arrested for speeding early Sunday afternoon. She said the three
had eaten supper at the jail and then been released around 6 P. M.
after
paying a $25 fine. Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, minutes later, confirmed
Herring’s
story.

When Doar received another call from SNCC’s Atlanta office
about 6
A.
M., he reported, “I have invested the FBI with the power to look into
this.”
By noon, Meridian-based agent John Proctor had received orders from the
FBI’s regional office in New Orleans to dig up what facts he could in
Neshoba
County. Proctor’s afternoon interview schedule included black
residents
living near Mount Zion church in Longdale, Sheriff Rainey, and Deputy
Price
in Philadelphia. Rainey told Proctor, “If they’re missing, they
hid
somewhere, trying to get a lot of publicity out of it.” Price admitted
arresting the three men. He told Proctor that they “told me they
had spent the day in the neighborhood of that burned-out nigger
church.”
He added, “I figured they might have had something to do with the
church-burning.”
At the end of his interview, believing his answers satisfied Proctor,
Price
slapped the FBI agent on the back and said, “Hell, John, let’s have a
drink.”

While Proctor was poking around in Neshoba County, John Doar
was at
the White House to receive the President’s Award for Distinguished
Civilian
Service. Doar got a handshake at the award ceremony from
President
Johnson, who praised his “contribution to our democracy as a vigorous
champion
of equal rights.” Doar returned to his office to find a
barrage
of urgent phone messages from Mississippi. He called SNCC’s
Atlanta
office at 4:20 P. M. to relay to Mary King information gathered in the
FBI’s preliminary investigation. Doar reported that Schwerner,
Goodman,
and Chaney had been released not at 6 P.M., as jailer Herring and
Sheriff
Rainey first reported, but after 10 P. M. The three were last
seen
after their release driving south from Philadelphia, Mississippi on
Highway
19, Doar said. He added that the State partrol had issued an all-points
alert.

After calling King, Doar met with Burke Marshall to consider
the
touchy
issue of stepping up federal involvement in the search. Doar
urged
action, citing the extensive training of the civil rights workers as
evidence
that they would not have remained out of contact for twenty-four hours
unless they were prevented by force from doing so. His view won
out.
At 5:20 the Justice Department announced the order of Attorney General
Robert Kennedy for a full kidnap investigation under the “Lindbergh
Law.”

4

On Tuesday afternoon, day two of the search for the missing
civil
rights
workers, the parents Andy Goodman and the father of Mickey Schwerner
waited
with Lee White, counsel to the President, outside the Oval
Office.
Inside the office, Lyndon Johnson had just taken a call from FBI
Director
J. Edgar Hoover. A White House aide announced, “The President
will
see you now,” and the Goodmans and Schwerner were ushered into the
Office,
where the President was still on the phone. The anxious
parents
listened as Johnson asked, “they found the car?” Carolyn Goodman
recalling
the moment later wrote, “I wanted to leap toward his desk and shout,
‘Tell
me quickly—are they all right?” Hoover had just told the President that
the blue CORE station wagon had been found in a swamp northeast of
Philadelphia.
According to the FBI Director, the car was badly burned—still too hot
to
touch. “Get back as soon as you have something,” the President
ordered
and hung up. He stood to greet his guests. “I’m sorry to give you this
news,” said Johnson, as he told the anxious parents the information he
had just learned. Taking Carolyn Goodman’s hand, the President
said,
“Ma’am, we’ll do everything we can.”

The crisis in Mississippi occupied the next five hours of
Johnson’s
time. In a meeting with Robert Kennedy, Burke Marshall, and
Nicholas
Katzenbach, Johnson summed up the situation: “There are three
sovereignties
involved. There’s the United States, there’s the State of
Mississippi,
and there’s J. Edgar Hoover.” The group believed that the zealous
FBI Director would be intrigued by the opportunity to penetrate the
violent
and secret KKK. Hours of debate yielded a consensus on a first step:
the
Administration would announce that it was sending a high profile envoy
to Mississippi to investigate the civil rights worker’s
disappearance.
Their choice for the job was former CIA Director Allen Dulles.

John Doar was at the Justice Department working late on
Tuesday
night
when he received a call from the Oval Office. It was his boss
Burke
Marshall telling him to “pull together all the information you have on
the Mississippi Klan.” Doar assembled a set of FBI memos the Department
had received together with a twenty-page speculative report on the Klan
written by a summer intern and put them in a three-ring binder.
At
10 P. M., Doar delivered the requested materials to a chauffeur, who
brought
them directly to the White House.

Early the next morning, Doar's phone rang again. The
caller
was
Marshall. "You better come up," he said. Doar walked quickly to
the
Attorney General’s office, where he met with Marshall, Dulles, and
Robert
Kennedy. Someone needed to accompany Dulles to Mississippi.
Kennedy suggested Doar. “No federal official knows the territory
better,” the Attorney General said. That afternoon Doar and
Dulles
arrived in Mississippi.

The first scheduled meeting was to be with Governor Paul
Johnson.
The
federal officials knew that they could not count on a lot of support
from
a man who, during his gubenatorial campaign had frequently joked that
"NAACP"
stands for "niggers, apes, alligators, coons, and possums."
Johnson
was already on record speculating that the missing men “could be in
Cuba.”
the governor said that he looked forward to meeting with the federal
officials
so that he could show them "there is complete tranquility between the
races"
among Mississippians.

5

John Doar had met the Mississippi governor nearly two years
earlier,
in another time of racial tension.

On September 26, 1962, a green twin-engine Cessna dropped from
thick
clouds above the Oxford-University Airport. On board the plane
was
Doar, federal marshal James McShane, and a twenty-nine-year-old former
Air Force veteran named James Meredith, who hoped to become the first
Negro
to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi. Doar and
McShane
had accompanied Meredith in two earlier failed attempts to
enroll.
Both previous attempts were blocked by Mississippi Governor Ross
Barnett
in defiance of an order of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
This
day low clouds had kept Barnett in the capitol, leaving it to
Lieutenant
Governor Paul Johnson to prevent Meredith from reaching the registrar’s
office.

Doar, McShane, and Meredith walked from the steps of the
Cessna to a
waiting green sedan. Escorted by several state highway patrol
cars,
the three men headed for the Ole Miss campus. A block and a half
from their destination, the convoy was stopped by about twenty state
troopers
and a nearly equal number of sheriffs from surrounding counties.
Lieutenant Governor Johnson moved forward from the ranks of the
troopers
as the three men in the green sedan got out of the car. “I’m
going
to have to refuse Mr. Meredith,” Johnson told Doar. Doar, after
introducing
himself as “an officer of the court,” reminded Johnson of the federal
court
order prohibiting state officials from interfering with Meredith’s
enrollment.
When Doar tried to hand Johnson a copy of a contempt citation, Johnson
said, “I would not accept the papers.” Meredith, wearing a gray
suit,
white shirt, and a red tie, looked on silently. Federal marshal
McShane
vainly tried to push his way through the troopers. “We are going to
block
you and if there is any violence it will be on your part,” Johnson said
sternly. Doar replied, “You people understand you are in
violation
of a court order.” Doar then began calling off names from the
metal
tags on the troopers’ shirts while the marshal wrote them down on a
pad.
Finally, after another unsuccessful attempt to muscle past the
troopers,
Doar, McShane, and Meredith returned to their car. As they drove
off, they could hear the troopers and sheriffs loudly applauding their
defiant state leader.

Four days later, Doar and Meredith again circled the Oxford
airport.
Doar looked down from the Cessna to see a field lined with Army trucks,
jeeps, buses, planes, in addition to tents, giant searchlights and
assorted
riot equipment. Meanwhile, the sightings of dozens of federal marshals
with their white helmets and yellow armbands had swept the northern
Mississippi
campus town into a frenzied state. Crowds waving Confederate
flags
and chanting anti-Administration slogans gathered near the university’s
administration building. Drivers honked horns as recordings of “Dixie”
blared on their car radios. Doar dropped Meredith off at deserted
Baxter
Hall, leaving him with marshals under orders to shoot anyone who
attempted
to break into his second-floor room. He then left to meet with
university
officials to work out the details of a face-saving plan, secretly
arranged
with the Governor, to register Meredith the next morning after a
theatrical
display of federal force. (Robert Kennedy and Governor Barnett
had
haggled over such issues as how many federal marshals must draw
arms.)
Events, however, quickly spun out of control.

Rioting broke out that night. As students drifted away
from
the
confrontation, more violent diehard segregationists drifted in. Rocks
and
bottles turned to bullets. Protestors attacked marshals with
bulldozers,
fire trucks, and automobiles. Casualties mounted. Robert Kennedy,
on the phone with an obviously distressed Doar, consoled him, saying he
knew Ole Miss was “a long way from Wisconsin.” His brother, the
President,
commented, “I haven’t had such an interesting time since the Bay of
Pigs.”
Around midnight, the Kennedys made the decision to send in the United
States
Army. The battle continued to rage all night. When it was
finally
over, 160 marshals had been wounded—twenty-eight by bullets—and two
people,
including a British reporter, were dead.

In the wee hours of the morning Doar returned to Baxter Hall
to
share
a dormitory room with James Meredith. Early the next
morning,
they drove to the register’s office in a bullet-riddled border patrol
car.
With John Doar standing by his side, Meredith enrolled at Ole
Miss.
At 9 A. M., he attended his first class, Colonial American
history.
For the next few weeks, Doar and Meredith would live together.

Reflecting later on the episode, Doar agreed that the
government
should
have come in with more military power earlier: “Would the Justice
Department of the United States ever have done it that way again?
No, they wouldn’t have.”

6

Four days after Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were reported
missing,
an unnamed FBI source was quoted in the New York Times as saying,
“We’re
now looking for bodies.” In Ohio, Robert Moses told somber
volunteers,
"The kids are dead." Only Mississippi politicians seemed to be in
self-delusion
about the three men’s fate. Governor Paul Johnson, who the day
before
had promised Dulles cooperation in the search, joked about the mystery
that gripped the nation. Standing next to the Governor of
Alabama,
Johnson responded to a reporter’s question about progress with the quip
and a smile, “Governor Wallace and I are the only two people who know
where
they are—and we’re not telling.”

Day four brought three busloads of sailors wearing blue
bell-bottom
trousers and old shoes and boots to Bogue Chitto, the site of discovery
of the burned car. Using walking sticks to fend off water
moccasins,
rattlesnakes, and copperheads, the sailors slowly beat their way
through
the swamp and countryside, looking for bodies or evidence. Nothing was
found.

As the intense search for bodies continued, investigators
found
several
corpses of civil rights workers in lonely Mississippi places—but not
any
of the three everyone was looking for. They pulled the corpse of
a black boy of about fourteen out of the Big Black River. The boy, who
was found wearing a CORE T-shirt, was never identified.

It finally became apparent that the bodies, if they were ever
to be
discovered, would be found not by a search but by an
investigation.
John Doar was later to tell a jury of twelve Mississippians that
“rarely
in the history of law and enforcement” was it “so difficult to obtain
evidence”
of a crime as it was to determine what took place in the four hours
beginning
at 9 P.M. on June 21, 1964 in and around Philadelphia. Doar
said “a thousand eyes explored every corner of Neshoba County” but
“Neshoba
County remained silent.” He added that only “extraordinary methods” and
“the maximum effort of the FBI” could bring the conspirators “to the
bar
of justice of law.”

The FBI recognized that solving the case would require
infiltration
of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, an
organization
protected both by its own insularity and the fear that it inspired in
the
community. Before it was over, the bureau’s “Mississippi
burning,”
or MIBURN, investigation would include interviews with nearly one
thousand
Mississippians. About half of the interview subjects were known
or
suspected members of the Klan. The final report was over 150,000
pages long. FBI Major Case Inspector Joseph Sullivan summarized
the
problem: “They owned the place. In spirit, everyone belonged to
the
Klan.” Sullivan said the usual bureau approach of convincing
people
that cooperation was in their own best interest did not work. “It
didn’t pay to push Neshobans, because they weren’t afraid.”
Locals
delighted in sending agents off on wild goose chases or debating agents
on issues such as communist influence in the civil rights
movement.
Sullivan bemoaned the countless hours spent “wheel-spinning” and
engaging
in “jolly talks with Klansmen.”

On August 4, the forty-fourth day of the investigation, a
Caterpillar
bulldozer began excavating an earthen dam site on a property southwest
of Philadelphia known as the Old Jolly Farm. FBI agents had
spread
the word a week before that a substantial reward would go to anyone who
told the bureau where the bodies were buried. For the sum of thirty
thousand
dollars and a guarantee of absolute confidentiality, an unknown Neshoba
citizen, acting through an intermediary, provided the information
nearly
one hundred agents had spent weeks trying to uncover. Shortly
before
3 P. M., agents began noticing “the pungent odor of decaying
flesh.”
Blowflies swarmed in the 106-degree heat near the Cat’s ten-foot blade
and buzzards began circling in the sky above the dam. Minutes
later,
the heels of a pair of men’s boots poked out of the newly exposed clay.
That evening the Department of Justice announced that half of the
mystery
was solved: the bodies of the three civil rights workers had at last
been
found.

Klan conspirators, once so smug, began to worry.

7

As dozens of FBI agents continued their investigation
through
the late summer and fall, John Doar followed reports agency
reports
from Mississippi closely, but spent much of his time doing what he had
done since he ended ten years of work in a family practice in New
Richmond, Wisconsin to join the Justice Department at the close of the
Eisenhower Administration. He litigated voter rights cases in the
Deep South. It was, according to Doar, “a job nobody else
wanted.”

The job offer had come, sight unseen, when Doar was in
California
working
on a paternity suit. Doar slept on the offer a night and then called
Harold
Tyler, chief of the Civil Rights Division to say, “I’ll do it.”
Doar
recalled, “I liked trial work, and I knew this was tough trial
work.
Also, I had some clear ideas about civil rights in this country.”

Doar arrived in Washington in July 1960 at age thirty-nine. In
addtion
to ten years of litigation experience at the family law firm, his
resume
included an undergraduate degree from Princeton (where he was captain
of
the basketball team), a law degree from Boalt Hall in Berkeley, and Air
Force service during World War II. Six-foot-three, 185 pounds,
with
dark, curly hair, he was described as “boyish” looking. A 1963
New
York Times profile of Doar reports that “observers sometimes liken his
manner to that of Gary Cooper, or his voice to that of James
Stewart.
They then add immediately that his total lack of self-consciousness and
his aversion to publicity make comparisons with any actor misleading."

Whatever may be said of his style, everyone considered the
reserved,
laconic Doar a man of substance. “John Doar had a clear vision of
what was unjust and intolerable, and he kept focused on that,” said
prominent
civil rights lawyer William L. Taylor. Within months of his arrival at
Justice, Doar became impatient with standard bureaucratic responses to
problems. Until Doar showed up, Justice Department lawyers used
what
were called “coaching” or “box” memos to obtain from FBI agents the
facts
necessary to develop voting rights cases. Sometimes 200 pages in
length, these memos dictated to agents the specific questions and
follow-up
questions they were to ask frustrated black voter applicants.
Doar
realized that it would be much more efficient to poke around himself.
He
did. His first trip took him to rural western Tennessee, where black
sharecroppers
had complained that farmers evicted them when they tried to register.
The
Justice Department needed to determine whether the complaints were
justified
and how many blacks were affected. Doar’s first night in
Tennessee
was something of an epiphany. He walked into the dim light of a
rural
clapboard church filled with Negro sharecroppers. Doar nervously
announced to the crowd that he was there to help. How many
people,
he asked, had received eviction notices. To his great surprise,
virtually
every hand went up.

Doar learned that building a strong case required being his
own
investigator.
“I was the first Justice Department lawyer who went down South to see
what
the facts were for myself,” he said. Sometimes he travelled
incognito
so as not to alert local whites to the presence of an official from the
hated Department of Justice. Doar, wearing khaki pants, work
shirts,
and old boots, trekked across cornfields and knocked on doors in search
of rejected black voters. “I spent a great deal of each year on the
road,”
he said in his plainspoken, understated way. In fact, Doar’s
frenetic
pace of travelling was legendary. “John Doar’s in Birmingham,”
one
reporter announced at dinner. “No, he’s in New Orleans,” another
reporter said. “No,” chimed in a third, “I saw him here in
Jackson.”
“You’re all right,” said a fourth reporter. “He was in Birmingham
this morning, argued a case in New Orleans this afternoon and arrived
in
Jackson tonight.”

His busy public life had its personal costs. The fourth
child
of Doar and his wife, Anne, went unnamed for six weeks in 1963 as Doar
crisscrossed the South taking care of civil rights emergencies.
While
he was away, Justice Department employees wrote various names on slips
of paper and put them in a hat. When he finally returned to
Washington,
the name Doar drew was Burke, for Burke Marshall, then his boss.
The child was named John Burke. “It was hard on my wife,” Doar later
recalled.
“It may have impacted my children some.”

Although recognized early on as a very talented lawyer, Doar
never
stopped
trying to become an even better one. In one of the first of
nearly
thirty voting rights suits brought by Doar, a judge reprimanded him for
not backing up his arguments with enough hard evidence. Doar took
the judge’s criticism to heart. From then on, southern judges
learned
to expect mountains of supporting evidence from Doar and other Justice
Department lawyers. “He goes in with evidence by the bale now,”
said
a court reporter. “I’ll bet that judge is sorry he opened his
mouth.”

Doar was a great respecter of truth. One of his former
assistants at
Justice and now Touro Law School Dean, Howard Glickstein, remembered
discussing
strategy in a voting rights case with Doar. There were two ways
of
presenting the case to the court, Glickstein recalled. One way
was
to straightforwardly present the facts. The other way was to blur
the facts in a way that somewhat strengthened the government’s
position.
When Glickstein suggested to Doar that they adopt the second approach,
Doar sat up straight in his chair. “Absolutely not!” he
said.
“You just present the facts as they are. We represent the United
States of America. We don’t blur.” Draft briefs sent to his
desk by younger lawyers were frequently returned with the demand for
more
“facts, fact, facts.” Doar once sent to every lawyer in his
division
a copy of a Rolls Royce advertisement. The ad said that the
ticking
of the dashboard clock was the only noise that could be heard inside
the
automobile. This, Doar pointed out, was much better that saying
that
the car was quiet.

Doar was so sincere and so well prepared that judges “took
anything
that came out of his mouth as the Gospel truth.” His careful,
thorough
approach and soft-spoken arguments bordered on being dull, but “with
all
the emotionally charged rhetoric of the time, being dull could be very
effective.”

There was one night in McComb, Mississippi when Doar had
second
thoughts
about his decision to become the Justice Department’s southern
troubleshooter.
A voter registration rally at the McComb governmental center ended with
nearly all participants rounded up and sent to jail. The only
movement
figure to escape arrest was Charles Jones, who had stayed away in order
to preserve a communications link. Jones called Robert Kennedy,
who
suggested that he call John Doar. Jones reached Doar at his
suburban
Washington home and told him the facts as he understood them.
Everyone
he knew was in jail. He had no bond money or support.
Rumors
were floating that the Klan would take Bob Moses, the groups’s leader
and
later director of the Mississippi Summer Project, out of jail and kill
him. “Help,” Jones pleaded. “Okay, I’m coming right in,”
Doar
answered.

While he waited for Doar, Charles Jones hid in a black-owned
butcher
shop. The next day, when the police came in looking for him,
Jones
was in a butcher’s coat chopping meat. “I didn’t know what I was
doing,” Jones later recalled. “I must’ve messed up twenty
dollars’
worth of meat, whacking on that board with this knife.” But the
ruse
worked. The officers left after being told by Jones that he had
not
seen the man they were hoping to arrest. "That night,” Jones
recounted,
“I heard this knock on the door. I opened the door, and John Doar
said, whispering, ‘Hurry, hurry, close the door.’ He said,
whispering
again, ‘Close the door. Those people are serious! I’m afraid they’re
going
to kill me. They’ve been snooping around my motel room.’ ”
Jones had expected the authority of the federal government to come
swooping
in with a cape to save him. The contrast with reality could
hardly
have been greater. “This was the might of the United States of
America,
‘the greatest country in the history of the world,’ telling me to close
the door and keep the light down and talk quiet.”

8

On the gray, drizzling morning of December 4, 1964, federal
agents
swept
through east-central Mississippi arresting nineteen alleged conpirators
in the murders of Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James
Chaney.
All of the men were identified as Ku Klux Klansmen. One of the
men
charged was Cecil Price, the deputy sheriff who arrested the three
civil
rights workers in the afternoon, then freed them later that
night.
Also arrested was Sheriff Lawrence Rainey. The men were not charged
with
murder, a state crime, but rather with violation of a Reconstruction
Ear
federal law that prohibited “conspiring to violate the civil
rights”
of citizens “under color of state law.”

Six days later, United States Commissioner for the Southern
District
of Mississippi Esther Carter dismissed the charges against all nineteen
men, declaring that the confession on which the arrests were based was
hearsay evidence. Life magazine published a photo taken at the
hearing
before Judge Carter that reinforced every northern civil rights
supporter’s
stereotype of southern law enforcement. The photo showed a
smiling
Sheriff Rainey leaning back in his chair, booted foot and exposed hairy
calf on knee, with a huge chew of tobacco in his cheek and holding a
popcorn-bag
sized package of Red Man tobacco in his hand. After the hearing,
the smiling and the laughing continued as defendants and their lawyers
congratulated themselves. Inside the courtroom, the mother of
James
Chaney wept quietly. Outside, an unidentified woman rested on her knees
on the sidewalk wailing, “Jesus, Jesus, no.”

John Doar and other Justice Department attorneys a month later
convinced
a federal grand jury in Jackson to issue indictments against the
conspirators.
But again Doar, the new Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights
folllowing
Marshall's resignation in December, would be disappointed. On
February
24, 1965, Federal Judge William Harold Cox, as ardent a segregationist
as could be found on the federal bench, threw out the indictments
against
all conspirators other than Rainey and Price. Cox ruled, in a
very
narrow interpretation of the federal civil rights statute, that the
other
seventeen were not acting “under color of state law.” "The right
of every person not to be deprived of his life or liberty without due
process,"
Cox wrote, "merely guarantees" against interference with this right "by
the states." Doar and his staff began to prepare the
government’s
appeal of Cox’s decision.

9

One month after Judge Cox tossed out the indictments he had
secured
against the Neshoba County conspirators, the ubiquitous John Doar
tramped
gamely in a downpour along Route 80 in rural Lowndes County,
Alabama.
Soaked to the skin, his black hair hanging across his forehead, Doar
passed
the midpoint of his fifty-four mile journey from Selma to
Montgomery.
The new Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights considered it his
duty
to superintend 300 Alabama Freedom marchers. The risk of violence
was great, Doar knew. He hoped that the presence of hundreds of
National
Guard troops would discourage would-be attackers.

Doar and the troops were on hand because of what had happened
in two
abortive marches earlier in the month. On March 6, “Bloody
Sunday,”
police and mounted deputies beat marchers led by Dr. Martin Luther King
as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama
River.
After a second unsuccessful attempt to cross the same bridge three days
later, white toughs in downtown Selma bludgeoned to death one of the
marchers,
a white Unitarian minister from Boston named James Reeb.

The mostly young and mostly black marchers sang freedom songs
as
they
walked, their spirits undampened by the elements. Many wore
plastic
bags converted into ponchos. Some children sported hats made of
cereal
boxes. The Reverend Martin Luther King limped along with the group,
favoring
his blistered left foot. Organizers of the march hoped it would
focus
attention on Alabama’s unwillingness to extend basic civil rights to
blacks.
They planned to present a petition demanding equal treatment to
Governor
George C. Wallace in Montgomery.

Twenty-one miles from their destination, Doar and the other
wet and
weary marchers made camp in a pasture-turned-quagmire. The group
listened to songs and speeches from over two dozen entertainers
supporting
their cause, then retired early to four large tents pitched on the
muddy
property.

Two days later on March 25, at 11:30 P. M., John Doar was
eating his
first meal of the day at the Elite Café in downtown
Montgomery.
Things had gone well, he thought. Thousands of marchers and
supporters
had participated in the final rally at the Capitol. More
importantly,
the march had been completed without violence. Then Doar was
summoned
to the telephone. He returned to his table minutes later with a
worried
look on his face. “It was the FBI,” Doar told his dinner
companion.
“A Mrs. Liuzzo has been killed on the road back to Selma.”

Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife and white freedom
marcher,
had
been travelling with a black man on Route 80 in rural Lowndes
County—the
same stretch of road the marchers had walked just two days
before.
She was shot and killed by one of four men riding in a passing
car.
One of the other three riders was Gary Rowe, a FBI informant and Klan
infiltrator.
Rowe identified the three Klansmen riding in the car, including the
shooter,
twenty-two-year old Collie Leroy Wilkins Jr. Rowe said the
killing
was carried out under orders from a Klan superior known only as
“Robert.”

Wilkins was tried twice on murder charges in Alabama state
courts.
A trial in May ended in a hung jury. An October trial ended in an
acquittal. In his successful defense of Wilkins, attorney Matt
Murphy
described Mrs. Liuzzo as “a white nigger” who “turned her car over to a
black nigger” so that he might haul “niggers and Communists back and
forth.”
Murphy attacked the prosecution’s star witness Gary Rowe as a man “who
would accept money from the Communists, money from the NAACP, money
from
the Martin Luther King outfit.” He asked the jury: “Could you
believe
him on oath when you know he’s a liar and a perjurer, holdin’ himself
out
to be a white man and worse than a white nigger?”

Following the failed state prosecutions, John Doar prosecuted
Wilkins
and his two fellow Klansmen on federal charges in Montgomery.
Doar
had to convince the all-white jury that the three men violated an 1870
Reconstruction law that made it illegal to conspire to “injure,
oppress,
threaten, or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise or enjoyment
of
any right or privilege secured by the Constitution or laws of the
United
States.” Doar contended that the Klansmen’s action fell under the
law because the march from Selma to Montgomery had been sanctioned by a
federal court order. It was considered a “difficult” argument,
but
Doar had the right judge, Frank M. Johnson, a courageous southern judge
who handed down numerous decisions applauded by civil rights
advocates.
He conducted the trial with his usual stern decorum. After two
days
of deliberations, the jury came in with its verdicts: “guilty” for all
three defendants. Judge Johnson handed down the maximum sentence
allowed under federal law, ten years imprisonment.

The first successful federal civil rights prosecution in
Alabama
history
came in Doar’s first criminal prosecution. President Lyndon
Johnson,
recuperating from gall bladder surgery on his Texas ranch,
congratulated
Doar on the “successful conclusion” of the conspiracy trial. Doar was
obviously
moved by the jury’s verdict. He said that he was proud to be an
American
and proud to be a lawyer. He expressed the hope that the verdict
would send a message to racist terrorists. “The court and the
jury
did their duty. I’m very proud of the system of justice in this
country.”
The jury’s decision came on Doar’s forty-fourth birthday. He said
he would celebrate by planning a strategy to cope with the appeal.

Two years later John Doar prepared to conduct his second—and
last—prosecution.
He sifted through voluminous FBI files, talked with potential
witnesses,
and traveled extensively throughout Neshoba County. Doar
recalled,
“I knew the area just like I know St. Croix County”--the county of his
youth in northwestern Wisconsin.

During King’s first visit, a month after the civil rights
workers
disappeared,
he addressed a crowd of blacks. He spoke about the case that was
on everyone’s mind. “Three young men came here to set you free,” he
told
the crowd. “Things are going to get better,” he promised.
“Walk
together, children. Don’t get weary.” Four carloads of FBI
agents protected King as he spoke in 1964.

Two years later, King returned to Philadephia to mark the
second
anniversary
of the civil rights workers’ deaths. By this time, King’s
outspoken
opposition to the Vietnam War had caused him to fall out of favor with
the Johnson Administration, and federal protection for his visit was
almost
non-existent. King led a procession of 300 from a local church to
the jail on Myrtle Street, where he stopped to pray at the site where
Schwerner,
Chaney, and Goodman had been incarcerated. As the group bowed
their
heads, mobs of armed white men closed off both ends of the narrow
street.
One young man turned a hose on the group. Battling their way on
to
the courthouse, King and other marchers fended off hoes, broomsticks,
and
ax handles. A large man dressed in a cowboy hat, sunglasses, and a
short-sleeved
uniform met King at the two-story red-brick courthouse. It was Deputy
Cecil
Price. Price said, “You can’t come up these steps.” “Oh,
yes,”
King replied. “You’re the one who had Schwerner and the other
fellows
in jail.” “Yes, sir,” Price answered. King tried to address
the crowd above the loud jeers of white onlookers. “In this
county,
Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were brutally
murdered.
I believe the murderers are somewhere around me at this moment.”
“You’re damn right—they’re right behind you,” muttered the
Deputy.
King bravely continued, “I want them to know that we are not
afraid.
If they kill three of us they will have to kill us all.”

King described that afternoon in Philadelphia as one of the
most
frightening
in his life. “This is a terrible town, the worst I’ve seen.
There is a complete reign of terror here.”

Doar later agreed with King’s characterization. “Neshoba
County
was a rough, tough, mean, insular place—a bootlegging rural
outpost.
It was awful.”

11

William Harold Cox and John Michael Doar had met numerous
times in
the
judge’s courtroom. It would be fair to describe them as being old
adversaries. A 1963 letter from Cox to Doar, written in response to
Doar’s
request to give the voting rights case of United States v. Mississippi
immediate attention, is revealing of their relationship:

Dear Mr. Doar,
I have a copy of your October 12 letter…[I] thought I had made it clear
to you…that I was not in the least impressed with your impudence in
reciting
the chronology of the case before me with which I am completely
familiar.
If you need to build such transcripts for your boss man, you had better
do that by interoffice memoranda because I am not favorably impressed
with
you or your tactics in undertaking to push one of your cases before me.
I spend most of my time in fooling with lousy cases brought before me
by
your department in the civil rights field, and I do not intend to turn
my docket over to your department for your political advancement….You
are
completely stupid if you do not realize that each of the judges in this
court understands the importance of this case to all the
litigants.
I do not intend to be harassed by you or any of your underlings in this
or any court where I sit and the sooner you get that through your head
the better you will get along with me, if that is of any interest to
you….

In a recent interview, Doar called Cox “a piece of machinery,”
and
remembers
that the judge “would really lambast me when I came into his court with
a motion.” Doar once tried to have Cox censured by the Fifth Circuit
for
his lawless behavior on the bench.

Cox owed his position on the federal bench to his friend and
Ole
Miss
Law School roommate, James Eastland, chair of the Senate Judiciary
Committee.
Senator Eastland had the power to block President Kennedy’s appointment
of NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall to the U. S. Court of Appeals for
the
Second Circuit—an appointment Kennedy very much wanted to make.
Eastland
bargained for his old friend, saying to Robert Kennedy, “Tell your
brother
that if he will give me Harold Cox I will give him the nigger.”

Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall met with Cox prior to his
nomination.
Cox assured the Attorney General and the head of the Civil Rights
division
that he would enforce federal law as it had been interpreted by the
Supreme
Court. Satisfied with Cox’s assurance, President Kennedy
nominated
Cox for the federal district bench. As soon as his robe was on,
however,
Cox became a major obstacle to the Justice Department. In one
voting
rights suit brought by Doar, for example, Cox refused to let government
lawyers inspect the public voting records of Clarke County. The
Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals overruled that and many of Cox’s other
decisions,
but his manipulations caused considerable delay in the progress of
civil
rights in Mississippi.

Eventually, however, the volume of suits brought by Doar and
other
Justice
Department attorneys began to limit Cox’s room to throw up major
roadblocks.
“We smothered them with paper,” Doar later recalled. “We were
really
putting the bite on Judge Cox.”

John Doar saw Cox make the most serious mistake of his
judicial
career.
“It was a Saturday morning in 1964,” Doar recalled, “I was in his
chambers
on an application for a temporary injunction. I said to Judge
Cox,
‘there’s nothing un-American about blacks wanting to vote.’” Cox
responded to Doar’s mild contention by describing Negro voter
applicants
as “a bunch of chimpanzees.” Cox’s offensive statement
appeared
the next day in a story in the New York Times. The resulting
controversy
nearly cost Cox his job. Senator Jacob Javits of New York and
Congressman
Peter Rodino of New Jersey led an impeachment effort. The attempt
failed, but received substantial support.

Was Cox somewhat humbled by the experience? The question
was
very
much on the minds of attorneys as they prepared for the upcoming case
of
United States versus Cecil Price et al. The United States Supreme
Court had reached its decision in the appeal of Judge Cox’s decision
dismissing
the indictments. The Court ruled unanimously that the indictments
be reinstated against all defendants.

12

Trial proceedings began on Monday, October 9, 1967 in the
white
stone
federal building in Meridian. Across the street front the
courthouse,
in front of Bill Gordon’s barber shop, Raymond Roberts, the brother of
one of the defendants, placed a large Confederate flag, bringing cheers
from onlookers. Barricades set up by Meridian police to keep
cameramen
off the grounds surrounded the federal building. Two federal
marshals
stood on the courthouse steps to further discourage anyone who might
think
of climbing over the barricades. Inside the building, a crowd of
jurors, witnesses and reporters gathered outside the second-floor
courtroom.
As the 350 members of the jury venire waited for the nine o’clock start
of the proceedings, they nervously shifted their weight from foot to
foot
and talked in low tones. The men almost all wore suits and ties,
the women their best dresses.

Inside the courthouse, Judge Cox imposed a strict
discipline.
No cameras were permitted anywhere in the building and reporters were
allowed
to enter and leave the courtroom only during recesses. Fifteen
attorneys
were assembled at the tables in front of the judge. John Doar led
a team of three prosecution lawyers, including Justice Department
colleague
Robert Owen and the U. S. District Attorney for Mississippi, Robert
Hauberg.
A dozen lawyers represented the defendants, including the entire
Neshoba
County bar.

In what Doar called the “first big turning point” in the
trial,
Judge
Cox had granted a prosecution motion to have the jury drawn from the
entire
Southern Mississippi District rather than from just the six counties
around
Neshoba County, as the defense had requested. Doar said, “We
would
never have had a chance with a jury from those counties around
Neshoba.”
With surprising speed, an all-white jury of seven women and five men
was
selected from the over 200 prospective jurors summoned. “We were
looking for signs of intelligence,” Doar recalled. “I had my guys
look at everybody’s homes—we were looking for homes that were well kept
up.” Seventeen Negroes had been among those on the panel from which the
final jury was drawn; challenges from defense lawyers excluded every
one
of the seventeen

On Tuesday, John Doar delivered a brief opening statement. He
told
the
jury that the defendants plotted murder “because they didn’t like what
these boys stood for.” Knowing that feelings against the federal
government
ran strong in east-central Mississippi, he felt that he had to explain
the need for a federal civil rights prosecution. The defense had
been saying the case belonged in state court. It was, the defense
said, a murder case, not a civil rights case.

I hope very much that you will understand the reason I have
come
here. It’s not because of any skilled experience that I am here,
but only because I hold the office as head of the division with the
Department
of Justice, and it is my responsibility to try and enforce the law in
which
these defendants have been charged.

The United States Government felt it was essential that one
of
its
Washington officials be here to speak directly and frankly to you about
the reason for the extraordinary effort the Federal Government
undertook
to solve this crime, and to state to you twelve Jurors why the Federal
Government has assumed the role of prosecutor of this conspiracy
involving
murder. I am here because your National Government is concerned about
your
local law enforcement and in a civilization local law must work if we
deserve
our liberty and freedom….

When local law enforcement officials become involved as
participants
in violent crime and use their position, power and authority to
accomplish
this, there is very little to be hoped for, except with assistance from
the Federal Government. But members of the jury, exactly what
does
that mean? It means that the Federal Government is not invading
Philadelphia
or Neshoba County, Mississippi. It means only that these
defendants
are tried for a crime under Federal law in a Mississippi city, before a
Mississippi federal judge, in a Mississippi courtroom before twelve men
and women from the State of Mississippi. The sole responsibility
of the determination of guilt or innocence of these men remain in the
hands
where it should remain, the hands of twelve citizens from the State of
Mississippi.

One of the twelve defense attorneys used his opening argument
to
tell
the jury that the government’s lead lawyer was the same spokesman for
the
despised Justice Department who “forced the Negro James Meredith into
the
University of Mississippi.” Doar nodded in confirmation.

On the first day of testimony John Doar put on the stand the
Reverend
Charles Johnson as a background witness to describe Mickey Schwerner’s
activities in Mississippi. Doar asked Johnson where Schwerner
lived,
what he did, what he wore, and whether he had a beard. Johnson
testified
that Schwerner wore “a goat beard,” prompting Judge Cox to interrupt
and
ask, “What kind of beard?” Johnson repeated the answer he had
given
to Doar. On cross-examination, defense attorney Laurel Weir
bombarded
Johnson with a series of questions designed to make Schwerner look bad
to jurors. “Did he advocate the burning of draft cards? Was he an
atheist? Did he encourage the boycotting of stores? Was he a
member
of the NAACP?” Then Weir crossed the line. “Now let
me
ask you if you and Mr. Schwerner didn’t advocate and try to get young
male
Negroes to sign statements agreeing to rape a white woman a week during
the hot summer of 1964?” Cox’s lips trembled. He told Weir
the question was “highly improper” unless the defense had “a good
basis”
for it. He demanded to know what that basis might be. “A
note
was passed to me by someone,” answered Weir. Cox persisted,
“Well,
who is the author of that question?” A pause. Herman
Alford,
one of the other defense attorneys, broke the embarrassing silence at
the
defense table. “Brother Killen wrote the question, one of the
defendants.”
Edgar Ray Killen raised his hand. Cox looked sternly at the
crowded
defense table. “I’m not going to allow a farce be made of this
trial
and everybody might as well get that through their heads, including
everyone
of these defendants, right now.”

“The rape question was a tremendous blunder,” Doar said
later.
“It was the second big turning point. If there had been any feeling in
the courtroom that the defendants were invulnerable to conviction in
Mississippi,
the incident dispelled it completely. Cox made it clear he was
taking
the trial seriously. That made the jurors stop and think: ‘If
Judge
Cox is taking this stand, we’d better meet our responsibility as well.”

The defense strategy of relying on their old ally Judge Cox to
bail
them out of trouble was beginning to look misguided.

13

John Doar and his prosecution team began to provide an answer
to the
question that had baffled so many investigators for so long: What
happened
in Neshoba County in the hours between the release of the three civil
rights
workers from jail about 10:30 P. M. and 12:45 A. M., when an engulfing
fire stopped a watch in their CORE station wagon?

Members of the Jury, this is an extraordinary case, it has
no
precedent
anywhere. Members of the Jury, this was a calculated, cold-blooded
plot.
Three men, hardly more than boys, were the victims. The plot was
executed with a degree of self-possession and steadiness equal to the
wickedness
to which it was planned. The participants believed themselves safe,
safe
because the crime was committed in Neshoba County, and Neshoba law was
involved. Members of the Jury, the defendants were
mistaken.
Such a secret could be safe nowhere, there is no nook nor corner on
this
earth where the secret of this plot would remain safe.

The prosecution case was built, witness by witness.
Ernest
Kirkland,
a black Longdale resident, described seeing the three men off on the
Sunday
afternoon of their disappearance after they had stopped to discuss the
recent firebombing with Kirkland and other members of the Mount Zion
congregation.
He recalled their dress: Chaney in a white T-shirt and jeans, Goodman
in
a khaki shirt and jeans, and Schwerner in a blue shirt with khaki
trousers
and a ballcap. State Patrolman E. R. Poe testified that Cecil Price
radioed
from his location on Highway 16 east of Philadelphia about 3:00, “I’ve
got a good one!” Fifteen minutes later Poe pulled his white
patrol
car to a stop at the intersection of Beacon and Main Streets in
Philadelphia,
where Deputy Price was parked behind three men, two white and one
black,
who were changing the tire on a blue station wagon. County jailer
Minnie Herring testified that Cecil Price showed up at the jail shortly
before 10:30 P. M.--six-and-a-half hours after booking them for
speeding
and “investigation”--telling her, “Chaney wants to pay off—we’ll let
him
pay off and release them all.” Herring told jurors that after the
three were let out of their cells and their billfolds were returned,
Price
told them, “See how quick you can all get out of Neshoba County.”
Dr. William Featherstone, the doctor who performed the autopsies,
described
the bullet wounds. Bullets went through the hearts of the two
white
bodies, he said. The Negro was shot in the head. Travis Buckley,
one of the defense lawyers, asked Featherstone, “You don’t know for
certain
these deaths were not caused by poisoning, do you doctor?” Featherstone
replied, “They might have been bit by a rattlesnake.” Laurel
Weir,
another defense lawyer asked, “You don’t know if those bullets were put
there before or after death?” Featherstone answered, “All I can
say
is I found them there.”

This is a case, in part, of circumstantial evidence.
Midnight
murder in the rural areas of Neshoba County provide few
witnesses.****Mrs.
Herring was the last known person to see them alive. She saw them
as they walked from jail. Five bullets are found in their
bodies.
The boys are alive at 10:30 when they are released, the station wagon
is
on fire at 12:45 fourteen miles northeast of Philadelphia.****Cecil Ray
Price controlled the time of release. He could have released them
an hour later, he could have released them an hour early, but he
released
them just so they would go to their deaths.

14

Members of the Jury, Neshoba County chose to remain silent
as to
what was known about the events that night in that county. Much
has
and will be said about the extraordinary methods in discovering the
guilty.
Should it have been otherwise? Was this a State to be
forgotten?
Was this not a case for maximum effort of the F.B.I.? Could the
Federal
Government have succeeded in any other way other than rewards, payment
for information, tending to expose the band of murderous conspirators,
the midnight killers, to bring them to the Bar of Justice of Law?

Three Klan members were Doar’s key witnesses. Wallace
Miller,
Delmar Dennis, and James Jordan became three of the most hated men in
Neshoba
County.

Faced with this wall of silence, the FBI encouraged Wallace
Miller
to
step forward to furnish what he had heard from his friends within the
Klan,
and to appeal to Delmar Dennis to penetrate the hierarchy of the plan
and
to reveal their secrets, believing that this would lead to fixing the
responsibility
on all of those who planned this crime. All of you probably have
an initial resentment against paid informers, but before you finally
decide
examine these men, Miller and Dennis. They are native sons of
Mississippi,
they are men of courage, because whom among us would doubt their lives
are constantly in danger?

Heavyset, jowly, balding, forty-three-year-old Wallace Miller
was an
officer in the Meridian Police Department. In April 1964, Klan
recruiter
Edgar Ray Killen, administered in Miller’s living room the secret oath
that made him a member of the KKK. In response to Doar’s
questions,
Miller described a Klan meeting in which Killen announced that the
“elimination”
of “Goatee” had “been approved” by Imperial Wizard Sam
Bowers.
The night of his testimony, Miller received threatening phone
calls.
Patrol cars were assigned to keep a close check on his home.
Miller
told reporters, “It’s hard to have to sit there and point your fingers
at relatives and people you’ve known a long time. It’s hard.”

To understand this case, you must understand the white
Knights of
the Ku Klux Klan. In seeking members, the White Knights are
reported
to be a political organization, a non-violent, peaceful group, but once
the members were inducted, once the oath was administered, the members
soon learned from Edgar Ray Killen that this was an organization of
action.
This was no Boy Scout group, it was here to do business.

Delmar Dennis was a handsome twenty-four-year-old Baptist and
Methodist
minister when he joined the Meridian Klan chapter as its kludd, or
chaplain.
Dennis, dressed in a conservative business suit and tie, calmly told
the
jury about a meeting attended by about seventy-five Klan members at an
abandoned school gymnasium on the night of June 16, 1964. He
testified
that one of the members interrupted the proceedings to announce that
there
seemed to be “an important meeting” taking place at the Mount Zion
Church.
Armed volunteers set out for Longdale, returning about an hour later to
report that they had beaten a group of Negroes, but saw no sign of the
despised “Goatee.” “It was agreed we had better leave the
building,”
Dennis testified, “so the meeting broke up.”

Dennis, who had left the Klan, was asked to re-enter and to
penetrate
the heart of the secret organization, and that he did. Members of
the Jury, the payment for information that these informers received for
the risk they took, for the time they consumed, for the expenses they
incurred
for the inevitable isolation when their role came out is pretty
meager.
Their payment was made for value received. These men are not
criminals,
they played no part in this or any other conspiracy, and for the FBI
there
was no other way to proceed. So, I come here now to ask only that
you do justice.

Dennis told the jury that he had met with Imperial Wizard Sam
Bowers
after the killings. Bowers said that he was “pleased” with the
operation.
Bowers told Dennis, “It was the first time that Christians had planned
and carried out the execution of a Jew.” Dennis said that Bowers
appeared unconcerned about the upcoming trial: “He said Judge Cox would
probably make them take [the three bodies] and put them back under the
dam—that it was an illegal search.”

This was a small, secret militant group, masterminded by a
fanatic,
who had singled out Schwerner as a man who had to be eliminated—not to
preserve or protect Mississippi, but rather to satisfy his own
consuming
hate.

On cross-examination, defense lawyer Laurel Weir attempted to
portray
Dennis, who had received $5,000 a year for three years from the FBI for
his cooperation in the case, as a Judas: “Instead of thirty pieces of
silver,
you got $15,000.” Weir’s comment brought a stern rebuke from
Judge
Cox.

The most incriminating testimony came from James Jordan.
The
FBI
knew from Wallace Miller that Jordan was a Klansman. They also
learned
of comments that Jordan had made to two nuns suggesting that he might
have
been involved in the murders. Jordan found it hard to keep
secrets.
John Proctor, the FBI’s Meridian-based agent, sensed that Jordan was
someone
he could break down. “You either get on the right side or you can
go to jail,” Proctor told him. Scaring Jordan by revealing his
secret
Klan number, twelve, Proctor finally convinced Jordan to talk.

With the aid of this information the FBI persuaded Jordan to
stop
running,
to give information and return from sanctuary required the expenditure
of Three Thousand Dollars, and partially support for Jordan since that
day.

James Jordan was scheduled to testify for the prosecution on
October
11. He was flown into Meridian from his relocated home in Georgia
and placed under heavy guard in the office of John Proctor.
Proctor
returned from lunch that day to find the government’s star witness
sprawled
out on his desk, lying on his back with his shirt off. Suspecting
a heart attack, Proctor frantically began pumping Jordan’s chest.
FBI men rushed Jordan to the hospital where his severe chest pains were
diagnosed as the result of hyperventilation, not a heart attack.
Later that afternoon Jordan was ushered through the back door of the
courthouse
by six guards with drawn guns. At the courthouse, he collapsed
again
and was carried from the building on a stretcher. The next day he
was back at the courthouse. At 3:30 P.M., John Doar stood and
said
the two words the packed courtroom had been waiting to hear: “James
Jordan.”
The courtroom stirred in anticipation as marshals went out to fetch
Jordan.
Every eye turned to the door. Some in the crowd leaned forward
for
a better look. In walked Jordan, a bald, square-faced blocky man.
He looked straight ahead as he walked forward to the witness stand.
Looking
pale and exhausted as he testified with his hands clasped in front of
him,
he never made eye contact with the defendants.

Members of the Jury, in the execution of a conspiracy,
there are
members of the conspiracy who play different parts. There are
master
planners, there are the organizers, there are the lookout men, there
are
the killers, there are cleanup and disposal people, and there are the
protectors.
Each of these defendants played one or more part in this
conspiracy.
Now, we’ll take the testimony of Jim Jordan who told you exactly what
happened
between eight o’clock and one o’clock that morning.

Jordan, in a flat, quiet voice, told the jury about a Klan
meeting
around
6:00 P. M. on June 21 at the Longhorn Drive-in in Meridian.
Preacher
Killen came in and “said he had a job he needed some help with over in
Neshoba County. He said that two or three of those civil rights
workers
were locked up and they needed their rear ends tore up.” Jordan
said
that Killen told him he “needed about six or seven men.”
Responding
to Killen’s request, Jordan began rounding up men. A dozen eager
young men showed up to meet with Edgar Ray Killen at Akin’s Mobile
Homes
in Meridian in the early evening. Killen told the men to get
gloves
and to be at the courthouse in Philadelphia by 8:15 P.M.

Two carloads of Klan members met Killen in Philadelphia.
He
took
them on a drive-by tour of the jail where the civil rights workers were
being held, then to a spot “near an old warehouse right at the edge of
town” where they were to lie in wait for their prey. Killen left
to see his uncle, who was lying in repose at a local funeral home.

Jordan continued his story. He testified that around
10:30 a
city
police car drove up to the parked cars. “They’re going on Highway
19 toward Meridian,” the officer told Jordan and the others.
“Follow
them.” Jordan’s car set off down the highway, following a red
Chevrolet
with other armed men in it. The red car broke down and Jordan’s
car
stopped beside it. One of the Klan members in the red car told
Jordan’s
group to “go ahead” and that the civil rights workers’ car “would be
stopped
anyway by the Deputy Sheriff.” Jordan’s car again raced off down
the highway until they got sight of Price’s patrol car, red light
blinking,
pulling a station wagon over to the side of a cut-off road.
“[Price]
got out and told the three men in the car to get out. They got in
the back of his car.” A three-car caravan, including the CORE
wagon
with a Klan member at the wheel, made its way back to a deserted clay
road.
Rock Cut Road, it was called.

Jordan told the jury and the filled courtroom that he was
serving as
a lookout on a rise above the road when he heard “about four” shots. He
said that he did not see the shootings—just the three bodies lying
along
side the road when he returned a few minutes later. As Jordan
testified,
a black female spectator in the courtroom began to sob
uncontrollably.
She was led out into the hallway.

Much will be said about Jordan's part in the participation
of the
crime or murder in this case. It is not important for you to
decide
who actually fired the gun, or which gun killed the three boys.

For an eyewitness account of the actual killings, Doar turned
to a
confession.
“Horace Doyle Barnette,” Doar told the jury, “felt an irresistible
impulse
of conscience to be true to himself.” Barnette made his
confession
to two FBI agents during a six-hour interrogation in a motel room in
Louisiana
in November 1964. But he had since repudiated it and stood trial with
the
other defendants.

Always beside [the young men of the Klan who might have
reservations
about what they were doing] were other men deep into the swamp, men of
violence and fury, men who were going to kill anyone who broke
away.
The most violent of all was Wayne Roberts.

As John Doar read Barnette’s confession to the jury, Barnette,
nearly
bald with glasses, stared impassively ahead. Since Judge Cox ruled that
the confession could not be used as evidence against any of the
defendants
but Barnette himself, the name of Wayne Roberts in the confession was
read
as “Blank.” Roberts was a beefy, twenty-six-year-old, dishonorably
discharged
ex-marine. At the time of the murders, Roberts sold mobile homes
in Meridian.

“Blank,” Doar intoned, “pulled Schwerner out of the car, spun
him
around
so that Schwerner was standing on the left side of the road, with his
back
to the ditch, and said, ‘Are you the nigger lover?’ and Schwerner said,
‘Sir, I know just how you feel.’ Blank had a pistol in his right
hand, then shot Schwerner. Blank then went back to the car and
got
Goodman, took him to the left side of the road with Goodman facing the
road, and shot Goodman.”

Doar continued reading, “Then Jim Jordan said ‘save one for
me.’
I don't remember how many times Jordan shot. Jordan then said,
‘You
didn’t leave me anything but a nigger, but at least I killed me a
nigger.”

15

The defense case consisted mainly of a parade of dozens of
character
and alibi witnesses, almost all of them friends or relatives of the
defendants.
During one day of testimony, they took the stand at a rate of one every
seven minutes. M. L. Graham praised Bowers as a person of strong
religious
convictions: “Sam is in church everytime the doors are open. I
believe
Sam has had an experience with the Lord.” Finis McAdory
remembered
that he had met with Deputy Price at 10:30 on the night of the murders
to talk about a runaway niece. Friends of Edgar Ray Killen said
they
saw him on evening of June 21 paying his respects to a departed uncle
at
the funeral home. Wayland McMullen remembered that he and his
wife
planned to go dancing with the Roberts, but they couldn’t get a sitter
and had to cancel. Other wives, friends, and relatives testified about
ailing backs and quiet nights at home.

Other defense witnesses challenged the veracity of the
prosecution’s
informers. Joyce Dennis, the estranged wife of Delmar Dennis, told the
jury that her husband’s testimony did not “deserve full faith and
credit.”
Beverly Rawlings recalled a conversation with James Jordan in September
1964 in which he confessed to shooting James Chaney. “I’m looking for
the
FBI to pick me up most anytime,” she remembered him saying. “I’d
just as soon kill another Negro as not,” he was said to have added
ominously.
The defense witness list also included two African-Americans.
Annie
Coleman, a Laurel, Mississippi resident since 1910, testified that she
had once worked in a theater owned by Sam Bowers “selling tickets, and
making popcorn and doing other things.” She said that she did not
know him to be involved in Klan activities. He was “a very nice
person.”
She said she thought Bowers was now working as a distributor of “those
machines you play records in.” After testifying, Coleman
complained
to reporters that other blacks had “been calling me the worst names I
ever
heard.” She said that “they think I’m some sort of bad person
cause
I came up here and told the truth.”

The defense rested its case. Jurors had heard 160 witnesses
presented
by the two sides.

16

On Wednesday morning, October 18, 1967, John Doar delivered
his
summation
in his flat, soft-spoken voice. A reporter for the Meridian Star
wrote that the local people in the audience sat in “rapt attention” as
it listened to “Doar’s crisp, unfamiliar accents.” Blacks in the
audience
occasionally dropped their heads into their hands as Doar painted his
graphic
picture of the deaths on Rock Cut Road. It is not Doar’s style to be
theatrical.
His most demonstrative moment came when he pointed directly at Cecil
Price
and charged that the Deputy had used “the machinery of his office, the
badge, the car, the jail, the gun” to facilitate the murderous
conspiracy.

Members of the Jury, this is an important case. It is
important
to the government. It's important to the defendants, but most
important,
it's important to the State of Mississippi. What I say, what the
other lawyers say here today, what the Court says about the law will
soon
be forgotten, but what you twelve people do here today will long be
remembered.

These defendants will stand before you on the record in
this case
and they will beg of you for indulgence. In effect they will say
as Gloucester said as he stood over the body of his slain king, "Say I
slew him not." The queen replied,”Then say they were not
slain.”
But they are dead. If you find that these men are not guilty of
this
conspiracy it would be as true to say that there was no nighttime
release
from jail by Cecil Price, there were no White Knights, there are no
young
men dead, there was no murder. If you find that these men are not
guilty, you will declare the law of Neshoba County to be the law of the
State of Mississippi.

Mississippi law gave defense lawyers the last word. Mike
Watkins
told
the jury that although defense witnesses might have been friends and
relatives
of his clients, “at least they’re not paid informers.” He
suggested
that “if life in Mississippi is miserable for the agitators who come
here,
it’s because they made it that way.” W. D. Moore complained that
“the government brought in its crack leader-organizer John Doar… and
then
they opened up the coffers of the United States for money.” Moore
speculated
that the prosecution was instigated by LBJ, Vice President Humphrey,
and
Senator Robert Kennedy. Herman Alford, in his closing, made the
improbable
claim that the defendants were “as innocent and pure as the driven
snow.”

At 4:24 P.M., on October 18, the case of United States vs.
Cecil
Price
et al went to the jury. After deliberating for three hours, the
jury
was escorted to the Lamar Hotel in downtown Meridian, where they spent
the night.

Most courtroom observers thought a guilty verdict was
impossible.
William Bradford Huie, a native of the South covering the trial for the
New York Herald Tribune, wrote: “Those are little people. Some of
them are quite poor. Some of them live out on the edges of small
communities, far back in the piney woods. How can they afford to
take the risks?”

17

As the jury deliberated for a second day, most of the eighteen
defendants
stood or sat on benches in the hallway outside the second-floor
courtroom.
They tried to look confidant. They talked. They waited.
Cecil
Price leafed through a copy of Gun Sport magazine. Sheriff
Lawrence
Rainey talked with friends, telling them, “Even if they turn me loose,
they’ll have done what they set out to do—break me.” Two
questions
were heard over and over: “When do you think the jury will come back?”
and “What do you think they will do?” A few yards away, the jury
continued its deliberations.

The jury filed into the courtroom shortly after 3 P.M. to
report
that
they were at an impasse. Judge Cox proceeded to read the so-called
“Allen
charge,” a set of directions upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1898
case
of Allen vs. United States. Also known as “the dynamite charge”
for
its success in blowing open deadlocked juries, the Allen charge was
opposed
by attorneys for the defendants who would count a hung jury a
victory.
Cox reminded the jury that trials are expensive, that a second jury is
unlikely to be any more capable of reaching a verdict, and
that—although
no juror should surrender his “honest conviction”—jurors should
“deliberate”
with others and not hesitate to change opinions. In the hallway
following
the judge’s reading of the charge, a court officer overheard Wayne
Roberts
joking to Cecil Price, “Judge Cox just gave that jury a ‘dynamite
charge.’
We’ve got some dynamite for them ourselves.” The court officer
reported
the remark to a not very amused Judge Cox.

The next morning the jury returned its verdict. The jury
foreman,
Langdon Anderson, a fifty-two-year-old oil exploration operator, handed
the sealed verdict to Judge Cox. Cox glanced at the papers, then
passed them to his courtroom clerk who read the decision. “We,
the
jury, find the defendant Cecil Ray Price not guilty. I’m sorry,
your
honor, may I start over?” Cox nodded. The clerk began
again:
“We, the jury, find the defendant Cecil Ray Price guilty of the charges
contained in the indictment.” The defendants appeared to stiffen
as they heard the first verdict. The list continued. Seven
defendants were found guilty, including triggerman Wayne Roberts and
Klan
leader Sam Bowers. Eight other defendants, including Sheriff
Rainey,
were acquitted. The jury reached no verdict on Edgar Ray Killen
and
two
other defendants.

“To have that jury return that verdict was a great thing,”
Doar
recalled.
“The jury paid attention; they were serious people.” It appeared to be
compromise verdict, but Doar is not so sure: “What is more likely is
that
they were applying the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard very
strictly.”
Looking back nearly more than thirty years later, Doar believes that
“the
trial helped Mississippi get beyond the caste system. Up to that
time, no white person in the state had ever been convicted for violence
against a black. After the trial, the good people of Mississippi
became more confident that they could move away from their past.”

Not all conspirators are equal in the eyes of a prosecutor;
some may
be guiltier than others. Doar believed Edgar Ray Killen “was really
central
to the conspiracy.” The jury may have divided on Killen’s guilt,
Doar believes, because much of the evidence against him was more
circumstantial
than was the case for those defendants the jury convicted. Returning
home
to Philadelphia after the trial, Killen greeted one of his neighbors:
“Man,
I thought they were fittin’ me for overalls over there.”

Judge Cox sentenced Wayne Roberts and Samuel Bowers to ten
years
each.
The other convicted defendants received either five or three-year
sentences.
Cox later said, “They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white
man.
I gave them all what I thought they deserved.”

18

Forty days after the Mississippi jury returned its verdict,
John
Doar
announced his retirement from the Justice Department. “I just
felt
it was the right time,” he said at the time. “I’ve been here for
seven years. I worked principally in the South and we got a good
start on many of the things on which I’ve worked.”

Doar’s departure from Justice caused dismay in the civil
rights
community.
Civil rights leader Joseph Rauh said, “This is a terrible loss at a
time
when we can’t afford any losses.” A former leader of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee agreed, calling Doar “one guy in the
establishment they could get to.” John Lewis, one of the civil
right's
movement's most courageous figures--and later Congressman John
Lewis--said
of Doar's years at Justice: "His job was great, his will and talent
even
greater."

Columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote of Doar: "His life has been in
those
nothing
motels on the highways or in the dirty-windowed hotels of small
cities.
It has been spent with people afraid to help him or with people who
think
about shooting him, in courtrooms where you can't win and with
politicians
who will not listen." He did win sometimes, of course--as in
Meridian
in 1967. And politicians did listen--eventually. Whether in
the form of landmark voting rights legislation or in the growing
numbers
of people willing to do what is right, the marks of John Doar on the
South
were undeniable as he ended his tenure at Justice.

Upon leaving Justice, Doar and his family moved to New York,
where
he
had accepted Robert Kennedy’s invitation to be the executive director
of
a corporation set up to redevelop the Bedford-Stuyvesant, an
African-American
and Puerto Rican neighborhood of Brooklyn. He later left the
corporation
and returned to private practice, but Doar’s years of public service
were
not over.

19

On a Friday afternoon in early January of 1974, Hillary Rodham
was
called
into the plain office of John Doar, chief counsel for the House
Judiciary
Committee’s investigation of the Watergate Affair. Doar’s
straight-arrow
ethics and Republican credentials had made him a consensus choice for
the
job. Stony-faced and terse, Doar looked across his desk at the
twenty-six-year-old
woman, fresh out of law school. They had first met the previous
year.
“Burke Marshall asked me to judge a moot court up at Yale,” Doar
recalls.
“Hillary and Bill (then Yale students) were there to meet me when I got
off the train in New Haven. They took me out to lunch and, after
the moot court arguments were over, they put me back on the
train.
That’s how she got her job.” Prepare a memo on the constitutional
grounds
for impeaching the President, Doar ordered, and have it on my desk by
Tuesday.

Doar told his team of forty mostly young lawyers that they
must
forget
ideology and focus on facts. Keep your mouths shut, he demanded,
as no leaks would be tolerated. And be respectful. Nixon
must
be referred to at all times as “the president.” Doar’s penchant
for
secrecy caused one member of the Judiciary Committee, Bill Hungate of
Missouri,
to grumble, “We’re so damn secretive that we’re going to impeach Nixon
in secret and he’ll never know it.”

Throughout all the tumult and rhetoric of Watergate, the
reserved
Doar
kept his characteristic low profile. He turned down Ethel
Kennedy’s
invitation to swim at her pool. Too political, he said.
Unlike
virtually all other players in the Watergate, Doar never appeared on
television.
He never wrote a book.

Most observers credit Doar’s careful presentation of the
evidence
for
convincing undecided Republican members of the Committee to support the
resolution of impeachment. His fair and even-handed manner
received
bipartisan praise.

20

It is in his work in the South, not Watergate, that Doar takes
his
greatest
pride. In his law office in New York City is a large framed map of the
southern United States covered with pins representing the many voting
rights
challenges instituted by Doar. “My time as a lawyer is almost
over,”
Doar wrote in a 1997 article in the Florida State Law Review, but “the
roll call of those Civil Rights Division lawyers still rings in my
head.”

In 1994 Doar returned to his old school in the Twin Cities,
St. Paul
Academy, to address a group of seventh graders and be honored at a
distinguished
alumni banquet For forty-five minutes, Doar answered the
questions
of the junior high students about civil rights and his personal
life.
He talked about his father, one of the most respected lawyers in
northwest Wisconsin. He talked about his mother Mae, a former
schoolteacher
with a strong interest in reading and in the arts. He told the
students
of a conversation he had several years earlier with his mother.
He
asked her what she was most proud of. He half-expected, he said,
to hear how proud she was of her lawyer-sons. Instead, “She drew
herself up to full height and said, ‘That’s easy: Being able to hold a
job and play the piano.’” The class seemed to miss the humor and
turned the discussion back to civil rights. A boy in the class asked
Doar,
“Did you ever agree that white people are better than black
people?”
“No, do you?” Doar asked. The boy quickly said “No.” Doar nodded.

As Doar approaches eighty, his once black and curly hair has
turned
straight and silver. His large frame has begun to bend. But
he is still driven, still overworked. He spends most of his days now in
a large windowless room in a sprawling building owned by the Ingersoll
Machine Milling Company of Rockford, Illinois. Court records and
other documents spread out before him on a large table. He
expects
his work defending the company to occupy him another year. Then
he
plans to retire to split time between his farm in upstate New York and
an oceanfront property in Sonoma County, California.

“As a lawyer, no one could have a more fortunate career than
I’ve
had.
It’s been all luck and being at the right places at the right
time.”
Thinking back on his career, Doar’s thoughts seem to turn instantly to
others—to people such as Burke Marshall (“the best there is—somebody
who
comes along once every 600 years”) and Robert Kennedy (“I have the
greatest
respect for what he did”). He sees himself not as a visionary,
but
as a competent workhorse. “If someone says ‘this is what the
drill
is,’ I’ll get it done.”

He speaks almost reverently of “the spirit of
Justice”
in
the sixties. It was, he says, a spirit governed by a “philosophy
grounded in hope.” Doar and his colleagues persevered “because it
made sense,” not because they thought their work would succeed.
Failures
and frustrations led to better approaches. “We learned,” Doar
says,
“you just got to keep going back. We couldn’t change Mississippi
from a desk in Washington.” The Department’s eventual success,
Doar
believes, was due in no small measure to its being seen by white
southerners
as independent from the campaigns of SNCC, Martin Luther King, and
other
social reformers. “We didn’t want white people to be able to say
‘the Civil Rights Division and SNCC are hitched together at the hip
like
Siamese twins. We kept our distance.” Doar thinks the caste
system
broke because each group “did what they did best—each moved through the
South like an independent campaign.”

Doar doesn’t consider what he did heroic: “I don’t think it’s
quite
the right word. We just knew viscerally that we were doing something
that
was awfully important. We weren’t trying to be heroes. At
the
same time, all of us realized that when our lives were almost over we
wanted
to be able to look back and say, ‘we did our best: we worked as hard
and
as long as we could.”

21

In a 1977 New York Times Magazine interview, Cecil Price
revealed
that
he had recently watched and enjoyed the television mini-series,
“Roots.”
His views on integration had changed, he said. “We’ve got to
accept
this is the way things are going to be and that’s it.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. said many times, “The moral arc of the
universe
is long, but bends toward justice.” If King’s prophecy is
correct—and,
at least with respect for the civil rights of black Americans, it seems
to be—it is not the result of some Darwinian propensity, but rather
because
of the hard work of citizens of courage and principle such as John
Michael
Doar.